Figurehead (8 page)

‘Honourable Uncle, is it really you? They said you were dead but I never believed them. I am so happy that you are here at last. Have you brought Prince Sihanouk with you? Please tell these people that I cannot walk. Please let me stay here. Please tell them. I know you understand me.’

‘You must leave, Auntie. There is no other way.’

‘But I am not strong enough to walk. What will I eat? I have no bowl, no rice.’

The woman reached out to touch Kiry. Sok kicked her in the ribs. She whimpered as a soldier grabbed her by her good ankle and dragged her down the steps and onto the road. She did not scream or complain further. She squatted then stood and with a lopsided, comical gait hobbled away.

Then one of the soldiers, looking for food, discovered a priest hiding in a closet.

‘Careful, boy,’ the priest said in Khmer to the soldier, who waved a gun in his face. ‘I’m French.’

As the soldiers crowded around the priest, Kiry turned his back and commenced studying a stained-glass window of Jesus ascending to heaven. He had met this priest a few times. He was, Kiry remembered, a compassionate man who held presumptuous but surprisingly perceptive opinions on the question of progress for the Cambodian peasant. He had also, or so Bun Sody had insisted, fallen madly in love with his housekeeper, a plump girl whom he had first employed when she was fourteen. ‘She cooks him onion soup,’ Sody had claimed, ‘and every morning she washes him head to toe with a sponge. She offers more but he refuses.’

‘I don’t want him to see me,’ Kiry told Sok. ‘Take him to the French embassy. Be polite. Don’t let anyone hurt him. Do it now.’

‘Yes, comrade.’

‘And while you’re there, find out who’s hiding inside the embassy. I want a full list. I want to know if Lon Nol really went with the Americans. I want to know if they’re sheltering Sirik Matak and Long Boret and—’

‘Will you be all right here without me, comrade?’

‘Just get me that list. And see if you can be of any use at the hospital. Then go and see that everything is under control elsewhere.’

‘Elsewhere, comrade?’

‘Anywhere. I don’t care. Just go.’

Sok approached the priest, who was arguing with one of the soldiers.

‘But I just came to collect a few things. My stoles are precious to me. One of them comes from Mexico. Peasant workers made it by hand, using the same cotton that—’

‘No.’

‘And my Bible. It’s in the vestry, just back there. My grandmother gave it to me the day I began school. I refuse to leave without it.’

Sok stood so close to the priest that they could smell each other’s mouths. ‘Okay, but you have one minute. That is all. Then we will go to the embassy.’

‘Oh, I can walk there myself.’

‘We will escort you. The street is very dangerous.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘We
will
take you.’

‘Yes. All right.’

‘You should have run away with the Americans.’

‘Yes.’

Finally it was quiet. Kiry sat on a pew, breathed deeply, held the rank air within his lungs, counted to ten and exhaled through pursed lips. None of the minor triumphs or quiet moments of self-satisfaction he had experienced in his life had prepared him for the elation that now threatened to immobilise him.

He remembered the excitement of his boat trip to France – he was twenty-two years old – and the sense of accomplishment he attained simply by arriving safely in Marseille. That was a pleasant memory, he supposed, although the truth was he had vomited the whole way and had irritated Bun Sody, who was his cabin companion, by implying he knew so much more about the world than he did.

From his time in Paris he remembered a deep conversation in a café with a young French woman about Lenin and Trotsky and the eternal revolution. His restrained delivery of his passionate argument so convinced her – he had long ago forgotten her name but she was tall and had long brown hair – that she followed him to his tiny apartment and stayed the night and most of the next day, an outcome he desired but would never have proposed. He was relieved when she left, having already come to believe that his moment of weakness had lost him thirty-six hours of reading time. When she knocked on his door a few days later, he pretended he was out. When he saw her in the street, he ducked into a doorway. When she wrote him a letter, he burned it, unopened.

He recalled being joyfully mute when a panel of French academics heaped praise on his thesis. The work was rudimentary and speculative, he now knew. Still, he was proud that he’d produced a piece of research which somehow satisfied a panel of examiners who were at war with each other.

He remembered his elevation to parliament. How proud his irretrievably frail mother had been. Now he knew – in truth, he’d always known – that Sihanouk had chosen him because of his apparent meekness. Still, he was proud of his reputation for incorruptibility and hard work. It had won him a second term in parliament, a useless time notable mainly because he had somehow achieved it against Sihanouk’s wishes. Still, the ordinary people had seen him in action and they considered him to be an honest patriot: what a useful tool that had been in the hard years that followed.

Kiry thought about his mother. She had died in 1973. One day, walking home from the market, she tripped and fell. She lay in the street moaning quietly until her neighbours came and carried her to the hospital. But the wards and the corridors were full of soldiers, so she went home. Overnight her leg blew up like a balloon, hard and black. One by one her organs rebelled, so that by the time she died a few days later the doctor could only guess at the cause. It was weeks before Kiry heard the news and months before he learnt the details.

Kiry thought about his brother Goy, older by one year. Goy had been a burly boy with manly shoulders, whereas Kiry was skinny and prone to falling over and skinning his knees. Inexplicably, Kiry always won their races to the well to collect water – even though he had the handicap of carrying the buckets. Kiry was twelve years old before he, too, learnt to lose on purpose. He wondered where Goy was now: probably limping to Kandal Province, assuming – fool that he was – that his well-connected brother would rescue him.

Inside an annex at the back of the cathedral, Kiry located a winding staircase. He began to climb and was pleased that his legs grew stronger and that he felt, at last, properly connected to the earth.

At the top of the tower he broke a couple of rotten wooden slats and leaned against the cold metal of a brass bell. As he admired the view his sandals crunched down on dried pigeon droppings. He was deaf – or indifferent – to the sounds the city made as it expelled its inhabitants: the din of two million shuffling people, the crying toddlers, the murmured survival plans that families debated and disputed, the occasional bursts of gunfire, the cries of the living as they saw corpses in gutters and floating like logs down the Sap River, the raucous backfires as victorious soldiers taught themselves to drive.

He could see a broken line of people leaving Calmette Hospital. Inside the hospital, Akor Sok herded the ill and the injured down a set of stairs and onto the street. ‘Come on, keep moving, keep moving,’ Sok ordered a woman with a bandage covering a useless eye, then a hobbling youth with shrapnel embedded in his thigh, then a man clutching his bloated bladder, then a woman holding a limp four-year-old girl, her operation aborted, her stomach wide open.

Kiry could see Wat Phnom, now abandoned. The smart monks had discarded their robes and transformed themselves into peasants, just as the sensible soldiers from Lon Nol’s army had shed their khaki skins. The beggars had left too, suddenly no more disadvantaged than anyone else, indistinguishable from the privileged citizens who wore their oldest clothes into the street and strapped their jewels and their dollars to their bodies.

From this vantage point, Kiry let out a single whoop of delight. He felt as if he was flying and he didn’t care whose shoulders he had leapt from. Anything was now possible. The view from the sky was so spectacular that nothing else mattered.

* * *

Make no mistake, Prince Norodom Sihanouk has heard every single ridiculous
rumour about the new Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia. He’s
heard about the mass killings of so-called ‘class enemies.’ He’s heard about
chronic food and medicine shortages. He’s heard that his own role as head
of state will be purely ceremonial and he’s even heard that his freedom and
safety will be jeopardised if he returns to Cambodia.

As is so often the case, the truth is very different. Prince Sihanouk is currently
in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, where he spoke with this
reporter. Shortly, with great optimism, with a song in his heart, he and his
wife, Monique, will return to their beloved Phnom Penh.

Prince Sihanouk acknowledges that the Khmer Rouge have largely
emptied the cities but he points out that most people returned to their home
provinces, that families were not separated and that no one was forced to
leave Phnom Penh if they preferred to stay. ‘I am so proud that Cambodians
are the first in the world to create a classless society,’ he says. ‘And the
evacuation could not be avoided. Lon Nol had turned Phnom Penh into a
Sodom and Gomorrah.’

This reporter has not yet visited the new Cambodia but understands,
from Sihanouk and other sources, that the government has eliminated rich
and poor, oppressor and oppressed, money and markets. Everybody in the
countryside is working, either growing food and raising animals or creating
and maintaining a reliable electrical supply or devising and constructing
irrigation systems or making and repairing bicycles or weaving clothes or
refining sugar or converting tanks into tractors. All this is simply the first
step. The construction of a new, equal, and corruption-free urban society
will soon follow.

Prince Sihanouk scoffs at suggestions that the Khmer Rouge have no use
for him now that the war is won. ‘The National Front over which I preside
is the absolute essence of monolithic unity. Nhem Kiry and all the other
leaders are genuine nationalists. They are working tirelessly to preserve the
sovereignty of our country.’ As far as Prince Sihanouk is concerned, Cambodia
has regained the key principles that as head of state he always fought so
courageously for: economic independence and political neutrality. ‘And
don’t forget,’ he says, ‘that I am the only non-communist head of state ever
to be chosen by communists in human history. I am an adopted Khmer
Rouge.’

—Edward Whittlemore, ‘As I See It,’ syndicated column

Prince Norodom Sihanouk and Princess Monique stepped from their specially chartered plane into the harsh light of Pochentong airport. Rubbish whipped around in the wind and came to rest against the planes, trucks and jeeps that were scattered randomly about the tarmac. Sihanouk had always wanted to own a bomb that left property undamaged. He dreamed of clearing Manhattan and repopulating it with his family and friends; of emptying Paris and turning it into his getaway palace. But now, standing and looking about a place apparently cleansed of all life, he was profoundly unnerved.

Or maybe he was hungry. Sihanouk had eaten nothing on the plane but a shrivelled-up baguette. He had wanted to wash it down with champagne but Monique had told him to stick to water and to keep his wits about him. ‘You are right,’ he had said, shaking his head at the tragedy and watching mournfully as Monique sipped from a glass of chardonnay. Now he was light-headed and desperately in need of a decent meal. A deep queasiness invaded his empty stomach. He glanced at Monique. He knew what she was thinking – Why aren’t we in Mougins? – and he willed her to say it aloud so that he had an excuse to rant at her about his responsibilities to his people, irrespective of his private wishes.

There was no red carpet for Sihanouk and Monique to parade down, just Nhem Kiry standing in front of a jeep. The driver kept the engine revving as Kiry stepped forward.

‘Your Majesty, welcome home,’ Kiry said flatly, his hands firmly clasped behind his back. ‘And Princess Monique, what a great honour – what a treat – to see you again. Please, this way.’

They drove to the far side of a tarmac, where a battalion of soldiers dressed in black stood waiting. Kiry ushered Sihanouk and Monique to straight-backed chairs and clapped his hands. The soldiers began to march about. Sihanouk concentrated hard but he could discern no pattern. Still, they seemed to know what they were doing.

‘Do you see the guns the soldiers are carrying, Your Majesty?’ Kiry said.

‘I see them.’

‘American, every last one of them. Brand new. We captured them after the imperialists fled.’

‘How wonderful,’ Sihanouk said.

‘And look. Look, Your Majesty ...’

The soldiers parted, revealing a group of M102 howitzers arranged like the petals of a flower. A convoy of tanks rumbled out from a hangar and circled the soldiers. Two helicopters descended and hovered. High above, a fighter plane roared past, banked, and then roared back again.

‘The whole lot American,’ Kiry said. ‘We have many more helicopters, you know ... But unfortunately at the moment we only have two pilots.’

As soon as the parade finished, Kiry bundled Sihanouk and Monique back into the jeep. The drive into the city was fast. The only other vehicles they encountered lay abandoned on the fringes of the road. They saw almost no people, even when they entered Phnom Penh. Sihanouk stared out of the window. Every now and then he would shake his head, almost imperceptibly. This was like some cheap movie-set version of Phnom Penh. Where was the tickertape parade? Where were the brightly dressed schoolchildren singing songs and waving flags? Where were all his loyal subjects, his little children? Were they hiding, waiting to jump out of potholes and swing down out of trees and appear from behind buildings to welcome him home? Sihanouk glanced at Monique, but she had closed her eyes.